1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates to the area of medical imaging by radiation. In particular, it concerns the estimation monitoring and display of radiation doses to which a body or certain organs thereof are subjected when acquiring images.
2. Description of Related Art
The highest risk of skin injury occurs in case of long and difficult interventional procedures.
These procedures often involve the acquisition of a 3D volume of the diseased body part, or the usage of pre-acquired (typically via CT or MR) 3D information of the treated anatomy. This 3D volume is reconstructed and stored on a review station connected to the vascular x-ray system, and means are provided to display the 3D information in the exam room on a separate monitor. Several features are already available using this module. The “send angle” feature allows to find an optimal viewing angle by rotating the 3D model, and then automatically send the gantry to the selected angle.
In the “Follow the gantry” mode the 3D model is automatically rotated based on the gantry motions so that the viewing angle corresponds to the current gantry positions.
The features described above allow the optimization of the geometry of the imaging systems used in the intervention based on the properties of the treated anatomy. However no information is provided that would enable the user to take the potential adverse impact of radiation into account in the optimization method.
There is therefore a need for a tool enabling the user to estimate the distribution of the radiation doses received by a body or by different parts of a body during the acquisition of one or more radiological images.
It is also desired, during the acquisition of new images, to avoid accumulating radiation doses that are too high in some regions of the body or in some organs, and consequently to be able to define the conditions of acquisition for subsequent images allowing optimization of the radiation doses accumulated in a body.
Methods are already known allowing an estimate of the distribution of the radiation doses accumulated by a body. However, the known methods do not provide the user with appropriate information that enable him to perform an effective determination of the optimized acquisition conditions of X-rays.
Besides, there is a need for an improved model of the skin of a subject, or more generally the surface of the body to be imaged, in order to obtain an accurate dose map.